Dull transport news If you want a weekly summary of rail-related transport news, Ian Visits and London Reconnections have you covered every Friday. I'm here with a much less interesting Saturday round-up of London's less newsworthy dregs, some of them not even about trains. 🚡 The cablecar is celebrating National Loneliness Week by re-embracing the Chatty Cabins initiative, first attempted in the spring, every day next week between 10am and noon. You book a slot, get paired with someone else who's lonely and hopefully have a life-affirming chat during a 20 minute round trip, perhaps continued over a drink in the cafe. It's plainly a good idea but also a mere drop in the ocean and also an admission that the Dangleway is basically empty on weekday mornings. I'm also unnerved by the instruction to "arrive at least 10 minutes before your scheduled recording time". Also only nine of the 20 sessions have sold out but 'online sales have ended', hence there's no longer anything of interest here. 🚇 Cutty Sark station closed last Saturday so that its embarrassingly unreliable escalators can finally be replaced by four new ones. The closure is due to last until 'next spring', which is a very long time to close a station but you can always walk to Greenwich station 11 minutes away and that's not a grim concrete cavern. Trains now give a little honk as they hurtle through without stopping. 🚌 A consultation has been launched to divert bus route 287 along Goresbrook Road, not the A13, for a mile and a half in Dagenham. It's long been an aspiration of TfL's to run a bus along here, closer to where people live, plus everyone along the A13 still has the 173 to ride instead. The catch is that two sections of Goresbrook Road would have to be made busworthy first - an "emergency vehicles only" gate in the middle and a pedestrianised buffer zone at the eastern end - so the diversion won't be happening any time soon. Also the proposals require the loss of two dozen parking spaces and turning ten local roads into one-way streets, so I suspect local drivers may be mighty pissed off if they ever dig down far enough to spot they're being shafted so that bus passengers, pedestrians and cyclists can have a better life. 🚇 Even though a new tube map is now available online I haven't seen any paper copies in stations, and I've been looking hard all over. 🚌 TfL's latest drum-banging press release celebrates the fact there are now over 2000 zero-emission buses on London's streets, up from 30 in 2016. This is plainly a good thing, even if it's only 23% of the entire fleet so there's a very long way to go. However all new buses added to the fleet since 2021 have been zero-emission so 100% isn't merely an aspiration, it's just a matter of time. Also the 2000+ milestone was actually reached two weeks ago when route 337 gained new vehicles, but these days news has to await its appointed slot in the PR grid. 🚉 The footbridge at Chelsfield station closes today until 11th August for refurbishment. This shouldn't really inconvenience anyone because you can always walk up to Warren Road and cross the tracks there, but Southeastern have still smothered the station with red information notices so local residents don't need me to tell them any of this. 🚆 I was on the Lioness line reading a book when a family boarded at Harrow & Wealdstone and sat all around me. One leant across me and passed a key ring to his mother. I stayed put. She opened her phone and started playing videos out loud. I stayed put. She opened a tube of Pringles and passed it in front of me. I finally decided to move, feeling bad about it because surrendering always looks a bit haughty, but we all have limits. They didn't react other than to shuffle up and occupy my seat. Later on the return journey I spotted a tube of Pringles left on the floor and several crisps scattered all around, realising a) I'd unintentionally boarded the same carriage b) they were indeed a thoroughly thoughtless family c) I didn't feel bad about moving any more. ✉️ TfL sent me a personalised email this week with the title 'Explore the hidden gems in your city with TfL'. Their chief exhortation was 'Why not explore a fresh slice of the city and check out somewhere you haven't visited yet?', and my main thought was that they hadn't personalised my email very well. 🚇 Last weekend TfL switched on the latest section of improved signalling as part of their Four Lines Modernisation Programme. It's known as SMA8, the section of Metropolitan line between Preston Road and Finchley Road including the really long run south of Wembley Park. Trains are now running faster under automatic control with drivers taking over again north of Preston Road. It's also the most complicated section of all, thanks to Jubilee and Chiltern trains in the vicinity, which is why it's been over two years since the last switch-on (SMA7 in March 2023). I took a ride yesterday and can confirm it does feel a bit quicker, especially south of Neasden, although don't expect to be saving more than a minute on a journey. ⚫ The Silvertown Tunnel is closed all weekend for snagging repairs. It means the SL4 will finally stop at North Greenwich, but not helpfully because it terminates there and won't be going under the river. 🚆 I saw the converted District line battery train being tested on the Greenford Shuttle yesterday. GWR have been testing it since last March and it still isn't ready. Other rolling stock taking a ridiculously long time to enter public service includes the new Piccadilly line trains (first arrived for testing October 2024) and the new DLR trains (first arrived for testing January 2023). According to the latest Board minutes, TfL expect to make further service reductions on the DLR this summer to manage the expiry of the existing trains. 🚌 If you like free rural Routemaster rides, tomorrow is Route 418 Heritage Day organised by the London Bus Museum. Loads of old buses will run from Kingston to Bookham via Tolworth, Epsom and Leatherhead. I enjoyed the very similar Route 406 Heritage Day last June but it was ridiculously busy, the buses were rammed and mine overheated. 🚲 ‪Hackney Cycling Campaign's annual croissant-packed Cyclists' Breakfast at Hackney Fields this morning has sadly been postponed due to a poor weather forecast. 🚌 Starting tomorrow the frequency of buses on route 106 is increasing to every 20 minutes before 7am on Sunday mornings. I did say this was dull transport news.

They're like the buses, these rotisserie places. You wait years for a decent, affordable spit-roast chicken in the capital, and then two come along at once. one in Holborn closed (where I would go at least once every couple of weeks back in the day), then Kentish Town, then Tooting, and then after hanging on for a year or two the final spot in St John's Wood shuttered. Hélène Darroze's Sunday roast (sorry - Dimanche poulet) at the Connaught, and while some of the starter elements were very nice (particularly a genius-level chicken consommé and Armagnac shot - hook it into my veins) the main event was overcooked, dry and disappointing. And, of course, stupidly expensive. Knave of Clubs (in fact I believe they opened within a couple of months of each other) is Norbert's in East Dulwich, a much more modest operation than that grand old Victorian pub in Shoreditch (I'm sure Norbert's won't mind me saying) but still aiming to apply intelligence and skill to the business of roast poultry. The menu is short - very short, just the aforementioned chicken with sides and a couple of starters - but then that's the whole point of a specialist place like this. This is not a restaurant that does chicken, it is a chicken restaurant, and if you're vegetarian, well, you can find somewhere else to eat. We started with taramasalata which in itself was lovely but the salt and vinegar crisps it came with was, I think, a flavour too far for the same dish, the astringency fighting with the seafood. Much better would have been plain, I think. But still, an excellent tarama. didn't like it, and was offered something else. In a hapless attempt to salvage both mine and the restaurant's mistake I offered to pay for the first wine anyway, so we ended up in the end spending a small fortune on wine, not all of which we ended up drinking. The chicken, though, was just about worth the stress. A healthily thick, dark skin packed with spice and seasoning, a brined but not in the least bit 'hammy' flesh, some excellent crisp fries that held their structure and flavour until the last bite, and a supremely crunchy, fresh salad. Perhaps it wasn't quite the same level as the Turner & George chicken from the Knave, for an almost identical price (salad and fries are extra here, but included at the Knave) but was still worth the journey. We also found space for some nice cheese from Mons cheesemongers up the road, a gruyere style from Ireland which was a perfect temperature. Which didn't help our £72pp final bill but as I say, most of that was wine, whether we wanted it or not. I'm in two minds about Norbert's. On the one hand it is perfectly acceptable chicken for not a huge amount of money and it's an unpretentious little addition to this corner of East Dulwich. On the other hand the whole business with the wine left us wishing the whole experience had gone differently, and yes it doesn't compare well with a certain other rival rotisserie spot in Shoreditch doing things a little bit better for pretty much the same price. I think I know where's more likely to get my repeat custom. We paid in full but didn't get a photo of the receipt. If you want to keep subscribing for free via email please sign up to my Substack where there may also even be occasional treats for paid subscribers coming soon.

One Stop Beyond: Merstham In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Merstham, one stop beyond Coulsdon South on the Brighton line. For positioning purposes it lies at the foot of the North Downs, a couple of miles north of Redhill thus very much in Surrey. It's a truly ancient village whose long term expansion is mainly thanks to rocks, roads and railways, most recently the massive M23/M25 motorway interchange which despoils the immediate neighbourhood. If you can hear a muted roar throughout today's post, that'll be it. North Downs Way threads through the churchyard so you may well have walked past. I walked in. It's always lovely when a quaint old church is unlocked for visitors, something St Katherine's tries to do most days. The interior looks rather more Victorian once you get through the door (and have located the light switches and turned them on). The font's properly medieval though, and above it is the colourful spider formed by the dangling bellropes that Jack and his team tug every Wednesday ('for fun and fitness', if you're interested in joining). I was particularly struck by the little yellow cards arrayed across the nave, two per pew, encouraging servicegoers to scan the QR code and give some money. I've seen 'tap to give' pads at the backs of churches before (in this case default £10), but the steady decline of ready cash is spurring a donation revolution in our places of worship. stripe between the escarpment and the village proved the line of least resistance. Heading west a red sign warns of an upcoming 10% gradient, this the civil engineering compromise for climbing Gatton Bottom, and heading east a slip road opens up on the approach to mega-Junction 7. This is one of just three four-level stack interchanges in the UK (the others being the M4/M5 and the M4/M25), built when it was assumed the M23 would burrow deep into south London, and since surrounded by a shield of woodland. very attractive and has an excellent name - Quality Street. It used to lead to the local stately home, Merstham House, but that was demolished after the war so it's now a a very well-to-do cul-de-sac. The jumble of detached houses includes a former tavern, a converted village school, a half-timbered forge and a cottage dating back to 1609. The inhabitant of one house spotted me taking photos of Quality Street and addressed me with a challenge - "Do you know how it got it's name?" I very much did know because I'd done my research, but I played along all the same. "It's not the chocolates," I said, "it's the West End play." He smiled, thwarted, then asked for the name of the playwright hoping to catch me out. "That'd be J M Barrie," I said and he nodded, beaten. When Barrie's play Quality Street opened on Broadway in 1901 the lead actors were Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss, and after the married couple moved into The Old Lodge in 1904 the street was renamed in their honour. We chose to leave all that backstory unsaid, thankfully, but if you are ever challenged while walking down Quality Street on the North Downs Way you'll know how to respond. Surrey Iron Railway followed the River Wandle to Croydon and was extended to Merstham in 1805, transporting sandstone from the local quarry in horse drawn wagons. As with many pioneering technologies it couldn't compete with later innovations, but what really killed it off was that its rails were too weak to support steam locomotives and by the 1830s it was gone. The rails here alas are replicas made by local resident Mr Postlethwaite after the originals were stolen. station on the eastern edge of the village, this still wonderfully convenient today. But most trains on the Brighton line speed by on an entirely separate line that carves a roughly parallel track all the way from just before Coulsdon to just after Redhill. The two lines now conspire to divide Old Merstham from the new, a large overspill estate built by the London County Council in the 1950s. You walk down School Hill past attractive tiled cottages, duck beneath a pair of viaducts and the conservation area swiftly metamorphoses into postwar pebbledash and brick. Thousands now live here amid a network of interlocking avenues, apparently the most deprived area of Surrey by some data measures, although quite frankly it looked like paradise compared to several parts of East London. At the estate's heart is a modern shopping parade with a Co-Op and an independent convenience store called Londizz - no copyright infringement admitted - located on the footprint of a demolished pub. Churches were still being built when the estate opened so three denominations got lucky, in typically postwar architectural style, whereas these days more people worship at the culinary trinity of Merstham Kebab, Merstham Chippy and Merstham Tandoori. The newest facility appears to be a snazzy Community Hub where the library's been rehoused, while the oldest must be the remains of Albury Manor. This looks like a patch of undulating wasteland behind Bletchingley Close, whereas it's actually a scheduled monument with inner and outer banks and a dip where the moat used to be. Merstham FC play nextdoor at a ground called Moatside, which is a much better name than the nickname their supporters have which is The Mongos. grassland along the edge of the estate. Thus if you're walking your dog you can shadow the westbound carriageway through open space and woodland for the best part of a mile, right up to the edge of the monster interchange, or you can cross another footbridge onto a slice of semi-untouched chalk grassland. I walked all the way to the far end of the estate where the quarries were, now lakes and nature reserves but strictly inaccessible except to wildlife because, as the scary signs on the gate attest, 'Quarry Water Is Stone Cold And Can Kill'. up in arms, claiming that this "huge increase in housing would bring Merstham's crumbling infrastructure to its knees". They've also successfully annulled the opportunity for 11 homes on the site of the former library because apparently it would overwhelm a service road, thus the old premises remain boarded up helping nobody. It's hard to be objective as an outsider unfamiliar with the level of local services, but it seems it only takes a few decades for the inhabitants of an overspill estate to become total nimbys lest any incomers might enjoy the same benefits they did. What a mixed bag Merstham is, and has inexorably become.